Skyglass: Chapter 3

PHOENIX

I contemplated the soggy spot of carpet below the broken skylight–the shards of glass at my feet, the watery bloodstains–and took a pensive gulp of honeyfizz cordial. What a delightful mess, I thought, and decided to leave it for Moss and Devin to deal with when they ceased their rooftop brooding.

“Don’t worry about Devin,” someone called from the kitchen. I turned away from the wet carpet.

At the counter, Zinn and Skyglass’ guitar player–the lone woman in the band–were taking shots from a polished goat horn. The drink they were knocking back was so potent it clouded the air with a cheerful, gut-kicking spice, but the two seemed unaffected: the guitarist exuded a razor calm, and Zinn was casually nonchalant. Thus far.

“He’s an elf of contradictions,” the guitarist went on when I sauntered to her side. “Rage, cheer, chaos, purposeful vengeance. He’ll be fine.” The woman was built like a thorn–small, pointy, and eye-snagging.

“Is too much vengeance possible?” I wondered out loud.

“Never,” she said.

I smiled at her and kept smiling, even when she didn’t smile back. Zinn took another shot while she and I inspected each other; he had the tiniest of smirks on his pretty mouth, so teeny he probably thought I didn’t notice it, but oh, how I did.

“You’re the guitarist,” I said to the woman as she refilled the goat horn.

“And?” she asked. She held out the alcohol-filled horn to me.

I poured it down my throat and breathed out booze-vapor. “And I want your name.”

She shrugged. “Sable. For my eyes,” she explained, leaning close and pulling down her lower eyelid so I could get a good look at the things she kept in her sockets. They were, quite sweetly, the darkest eyeballs I’d ever seen. Like she’d replaced her irises and pupils with itty-bitty black holes.

“I’m Phoenix,” I told her. “Moss’s…caretaker. You’ve heard of me, I’m sure.” I grinned, liking my new self-appointed title.

Now Sable smiled, though it wasn’t friendly. “I have. Devin’s talkative, and Marko gets paranoid when it comes to Moss’s personal relations. You meet Zinn yet?”

I shook my head firmly, and pretended I’d never asked Zinn for sex, or slurped boiled leaves with him–just to see his reaction.

Zinn didn’t even blink. He shook my hand again, maybe a slight gleam in his pickle-eyes, and said, “I play with strings, feed the trees, plus…other things I shouldn’t mention in polite company,” he added with a sly glance in Sable’s direction.

She admonished his nose with a skinny knife. Zinn backed off, grinning, before she could empty his socket with her skewer.

Devin and Moss finally returned from the roof via the stairs, both of them sopping, and one of them bouncy and ready for alcohol: Devin, obviously. Moss seemed to have absorbed the singer’s moodiness (leveling up his grumpiness to almost superhuman heights), and instead set up camp by the bathroom door with his headphones.

Sable procured something from under the counter: a crinkling cellophane package of blue, bunny-shaped marshmallows I’d only ever seen sold on the black market. She slammed them against Devin’s chest, then dropped them into his eager hands.

“Better eat these,” she told him, like a warning. “They’re from Yunayuna.”

He squeaked in reply, shedding any lingering depression like the flecks of rainwater and blood scattering from his nodding head.

Sable mixed him a simple, sticky drink: one part honey, one part rye whiskey, poured over a handful of the frozen gummy bears Devin had tossed in the freezer when he’d first arrived. He hugged the package of blue bunnies with one arm and sipped pensively at his drink.

“Too many green bears,” he muttered after a moment’s consideration. He plucked out a grassy-hued gummy from his tumbler and threw it at Moss.

My housemate pinched the bear between his boney fingers and stabbed it with a shard of broken glass, before sagging back against the wall and continuing his mope.

Boo hoo. I turned my back on him, bored with his sulking–if he didn’t want his friends, I had no problem stealing them for the night.

Proceed to Chapter 3, page 3–>